Michael Haneke is one of the best filmmakers working on the planet, and in this film he offers up a harrowing, inchoate depiction of social degeneration in the wake of an unseen, unnamed cataclysmic event. Powerful, unsentimental and heartwrenching.
Simply magical. The narrative begins in the early eighties at a hospital in rural Thailand and mostly follows a young, strong-willed female doctor as she negotiates her position in a world divided by traditional beliefs systems and late-modern efficiency. The second half seemingly takes place in the present but tells (more or less) the same story with many of the same actors, focusing mostly on a young male doctor (we meet him in the first section) working in a very modern, urban hospital. I can’t tell you what it all means–Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a kinder, gentler David Lynch–but the film has a kind of dreamy, Proustian quality as it dances lightly around such themes as time, memory, repetition, and the mystery and impermanence of beauty.
I love the way Gus Van Sant finds lyricism in the banal repetitions of life in an all-American institution, capturing the cacophany of high school existence with its band practices, choral rehearsals, hallway conversations, athletic drills, and classroom discussions merging and blending in and out of one another and reverberating off the walls. Indeed, the use of sound in Elephant is excellent–the diagetic background noise occasionally transmogrifying into something eerily expressionistic as the film momentarily moves away from a cold and clinical document of teenage ennui to allow the viewer aural glimpses into the characters’ inner worlds.
This film's taut, sexually menacing and ominous atmosphere is mesmerizing. To watch it is to let go of the desire to control narrative. One must embrace the ambiguities and simply watch the actors’ faces, marvel at Jonathan Glazer’s use of sound and silence, and be impressed by the film’s craft while also acknowledging how much emotional terrain is mined in this metaphysical detective story.
A harrowing exploration of grief and vengeance from Beligian filmmakers, the Dardenne Brothers.
I include this first feature by New Zealander Jane Campion, because it unnerved my students to the point of revolt. What more can you ask from any work of art.
Wong Kar Wai's elegant and subdued story of unrequited love between a man and a woman--who have discovered their spouses are having an affair--is one of the best films I have seen in years.
A fragile, nostalgic glimpse into working class England during the 1950s.
A disturbing film about faith and moral relativity. This is one of Woody Allen's greatest works.
Mira Nair's post-colonial, multi-generational love story (its central action is a Punjabi wedding) is a colorful melodrama full of memorable characters and great music.
Peter Bogdonavich's (What's Up Doc?, Paper Moon) first film is an elegiac tone poem about the end of an era that probably never existed in the first place.
Set in what once was a regal now dilapidated Taipei movie palace (a concrete mausoleum full of ghosts or maybe those mysterious men in the belly of the building are simply cruising for sex, I’m not sure), Tsai Ming-liang’s film captures the theatre’s final screening before closing its doors and jumps back and forth between a handful of audience members and staff in the cavernous theatre with the 1966 King Hu kung-fu epic Dragon Inn being projected on the screen.
This 1986 BBC television mini-series, directed by Jon Amiel and written by the late, great Dennis Potter, is a fascinating melding of stream-of-conscious narrativity, American musicals, and film noir tropes.
Hirokazu Kore-eda's film tells a story of the recently dead and the counselors (angels?) who help them choose a memory from their past in order to produce a film of that moment before they are allowed to transition beyond the material (which looks a lot like a dilapidated hospital) into the immaterial. The actors were, for the most part, non-professionals and their presences are deeply felt.
Playwright Kenneth Lonergan cinematic debut is a heartbreaking yet simple story about ordinary people wrestling with the past while pushing forward into the present. Films as good as this rarely get made.
This Swedish film, from writer/director Lukas Moodysson, takes place in a 1970s hippie commune located in a large, unruly house in the suburbs of Stockholm. Although quite funny, the film revolves around a series of failed and failing relationships and provides an engaging and unflinching portrait of humanity in conflict and in love.
This film, set among Domincan Americans in lower-Manhattan, avoids every "ghetto" cliche in the book. It is also one of the most satisfying love stories of the new millenium.
